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A Story About Dirt Track Racing

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  • A Story About Dirt Track Racing


    Back in the late 70's I was great friends with some guys who ran a VW repair shop. The primaries were two brothers and another guy who were all partners in the business and they had a couple more employees. They were all mechanics and my friend's brother was a master engine builder, the best ever.

    My friend built a Karmann Ghia to race dirt track. That's what he wanted to do. Gloss black. That thing was gorgeous when it was washed off.

    His brother built him the best engine ever to meets the specs. I think at that time at that track the maximum displacement for mini-stock was 1700cc with two one barrel carbs. I think, memory is clouded, but he was at the max, whatever it was.

    He raced it for a whole year and never passed anybody. He was frustrated. We were sitting at my house drinking beer and he said he was seriously thinking about a totally illegally large engine just to see what it feels like to pass somebody, just one time for the fun of it.

    And then he got a better idea. Tires. He went for a $400 set of dirt track race tires to put on it. That stressed his relationship with his wife. Plus he was spending all night every night at the shop after business hours working on the race car. Racing is a drug.

    But he went out there the next year and won nearly every race with those tires. Won the track mini-stock championship. There he is, he made it.

    The next year of course he wanted to do it again. and now his wife was getting REAL tired of it. She was a cool lady herself, she liked to wear a T-shirt that said, "Itty Bitty Titty Committee." You could do that back then without any social backlash. But she was getting tired of that race car thing.

    She gave him an ultimatum - We're going to the beach together this weekend instead of you racing, or ELSE. The BIG else. So he gave in, and secretly got one of his employees to drive the car that Saturday night. The employee had a crapbox Bug of his own making slow laps. It's the car that won the championship at that track, not the driver.

    So my friend's down at the beach on his second honeymoon and his employee drew the pole position for the main event. That car was faster than what he was used to. He took the green flag and made it through 1 and 2, but in turn 3 he went straight over the wall, through the fence and into the parking lot. I've never seen a car so wrecked, like a wad of tin foil. And he broke his arm.

    My friend said that's the best favor anybody has ever done for him, to get rid of that race car for him.

    The End.
    Last edited by pdub; February 27, 2019, 05:00 PM.
    Charter member of the Turd Nuggets

  • #2
    That sounds like a boyhood fantasy come true. Thinking if you picked the right car and the right parts nobody else would be able to figure it out and you'd do nothing but win races. Too bad it don't work that way.
    My hobby is needing a hobby.

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    • #3
      Dirt track tires HOOK like no tomorrow. No doubt.
      Of all the paths you take in life - make sure a few of them are dirt.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by STINEY View Post
        Dirt track tires HOOK like no tomorrow. No doubt.
        All of that stuff would be in my "book" if I ever wrote it. But I don't think I have time enough left to write it and I'm sure nobody would be interested in reading it. Only about 3% of it would be about cars, as reflected by my history here on this forum.

        That dirt race track.....I was there as a spectator, pseudo team member, that place.....ohhh man. That was something. And at the end of the night everybody went back home, most not realizing what just actually happened.
        Charter member of the Turd Nuggets

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        • #5
          Maybe he should have put Ms. Itty Bitty in the car. Could be she'd have loved it . . . or crashed it . . . and felt guilted into letting him build a better car . . . .

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          • #6
            Originally posted by Gateclyve Photographic View Post
            Maybe he should have put Ms. Itty Bitty in the car. Could be she'd have loved it . . . or crashed it . . . and felt guilted into letting him build a better car . . . .
            They did have a Powder Puff race for that. I mean, they had it all.

            The guy that wrecked the Ghia that Saturday night, his own crapbox Bug was powder blue. And slow, no chance. Barely an also-ran. But he did something wrong during a heat race one time and when he got to the pits there was a female member of the offended team waiting to let him have it when he came to a stop. She was working out on his helmet with a fire extinguisher.

            The running joke at the shop after that was, there's not a single woman at that whole track he can't beat.
            Last edited by pdub; February 28, 2019, 02:32 PM.
            Charter member of the Turd Nuggets

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            • #7
              Customer carved dirt tires HOOK.. Teams that are at the front most times have more hours in carving the tread, than in the chassis set up for the track they are at.

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              • #8
                I don't remember him carving the tires or talking about doing it. I don't think he did. He just put them on there and the car lit up. Yep, that did it. The last piece to the puzzle. Some nights his challenge was to lap the field in a 15-lap main event. He had them by that much. It was the tires.

                At the same time I had the hotrod street Bug with everything on it. I didn't build it, I bought it, But it wouldn't "go," not like it should. And it didn't "go" until the Gene Berg headers. Then it "went," it would pull the front wheels off of the ground. Scary fast. Same overall setup. One more missing part required, the headers. I'll never be able to prove it, but I think Red would outrun that Bug by a lot. But that was fast back then, I outran motorcycles in street races.
                Charter member of the Turd Nuggets

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